XL REVIEWS

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 'Red Cans,' 'All Dressed in White,' 'The Good Doctor'

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Rock music

PETTY, HEARTBREAKERS ROCK JUST ENOUGH

DALLAS — Near the end of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' hour and 50-minute show at the Smirnoff Music Centre on Friday, I ditched my 20th-row seat and climbed all the way to the back of the grass section, to see how the show would play at the Austin City Limits Music Festival, which Petty will headline Sept. 17. As the tightest band in rock ran through "Don't Come Around Here No More," with its strobe-lit guitar freakout dissolve, then "Refugee," the song that made them superstars of the summer sheds, it sounded just as powerful from the back as when there were just 20 heads in a line between me and the stage.

Therein is revealed the best thing and the worst about Petty's "Highway Companion" tour. The songs sounded great, like the records with louder drums. But this veteran band had seemingly forgotten how to blow your face off up front. Until they slayed the crowd of about 15,000 with a show-ending "American Girl" that was more than worth the traffic jam that followed, there wasn't much intensity. Such earlier performed tunes as "I Need To Know," with guest Stevie Nicks on lead vocals, and "I Won't Back Down" should breathe fire in a live setting, especially when the audience is as into the band as they were in Dallas. But Petty and the Heartbreakers were content to play off the sturdy timing of drummer Steve Ferrone, the human click track. Petty's stage presence — a constant bob followed by a look of detached wonderment between songs — got old fast. Turns out he's a normal 55-year-old guy with a really cool vest collection.

Opening with "Listen To Her Heart" (with its line about how "you think you're gonna take her away, with your money and your cocaine" sounding particularly dated), the band kept it upper mid-tempo for most of the first half of the show. "Free Falling" had the entire crowd singing along, while the obligatory "one from the new album," the "La Grange" riff-copping "Saving Grace," held the fans' devotion. Petty looked genuinely impressed at how well the unfamiliar tune went over in the field of hits, then rewarded the crowd with a version of the Yardbirds' sped-up "I'm a Man" that took us back to the early '60s with Scott Thurston's salty harmonica.

Celebrating the 30th anniversary of deciding that Mudcrutch was a really bad band name and "the Heartbreakers" would be better, the set touched on all aspects of Petty's career, even digging up "Handle With Care" by the Traveling Wilburys and bringing out Nicks for a duet of "Stop Dragging My Heart Around." If there was a theme, it was that Petty and the Heartbreakers, the greatest B plus in rock history, have grown old gracefully. They gave the crowd its money's worth, but little more. —Michael Corcoran

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Theater

ODD BUT INTERESTING 'CANS'

The conceits start before you even take your seat at the Off Center, where "Red Cans," the latest frolic from Rubber Repertory — otherwise known as Matt Hislope and Josh Meyer — now plays. Better be wearing well-fitting shoes, you're admonished by the barker in front of the theater. And be forewarned if you use strong perfumes, colognes or deodorants. The cans can smell, you're told, and might not like it.

It's a clever way to set up the dialogue-less, 60-minute show that features a dozen actors who have folded themselves into cylindrical red fabric laundry hampers. A few cans include armholes and thus propel themselves ape-like around the bare, darkened warehouse theater stage. The rest of the cans scoot or roll around.

They knock into each other, move objects (a cage with a dog in it, for example), form little trios or teams that oppose other trios or teams, scamper underneath the seat risers. By the end, they've enacted, or suggested, a large chunk of the human experience — a kind of basic survival-of-the-fittest tale.

"Red Cans" isn't wholly new or original. Rather, it cleverly channels, combines and presents something of a history of symbolic, absurdist and physical modes of theater — mime, Cirque du Soleil, the preternatural dance moves of Pilobolus, Beckett, even a little commedia dell'arte (albeit wordless) — into one engaging and odd little package, full of weird and entertaining images.

("Red Cans" continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through Aug. 19 at the Off Center, 2211-A Hidalgo St. $10-$25 (Thursdays pay-what-you-wish). 476-7833.)

— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

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Video art

FLASH, BUT LITTLE FINESSE

The problem with contemporary video and film art? So much of it is dull and overlong and, as a result, self-indulgent. It's as if the medium distracts artists from developing and deepening the content. Putting an underdeveloped idea on video doesn't make it more interesting.

Such is the case with the majority of "All Dressed in White," now on view at Women & Their Work: It asks way too much of the viewer, yet doesn't deliver in equal accord.

That's not fair.

It's complicated even more by the fact that all seven projects come with audio tracks: One broadcasts its sound around the gallery; the others offer only a single pair of headphones apiece. Sure, the headphones are necessary to keep the gallery free of overlapping soundtracks. But it also means that only one visitor at a time can fully experience each artwork. And when those projections last seven, eight or even 17 minutes (as is case with the amusing and satirical short film "Attack of the Bride Monster" by Vicky Boone and Leslie Belt, one of the better moments of the otherwise lackluster exhibit), it's hard to take everything in if there's even so much as a handful of visitors jockeying for headphones.

That's a real shame, not only with "Attack," but also with Cauleen Smith's "Marriage Is for White People," a clever re-creation of all the blog-matter and Internet chatter that kicked up after a Washington Post article this spring about marriage statistics of the African American community.

Interestingly, on Saturday the audio component for Julie Hanus' "Fifty Brides on a Fire Escape" wasn't working. Still, the three-minute montage, shot on Super-8 film, charmed with its jumpy washed-out images of brides parading on and then off the rickety metal staircase hugging a historic building.

Funny.

("All Dressed in White" continues 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays through Sept. 9 at Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca St. Free. 477-1064.)

— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

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Comedy

'DOCTOR' SUCCEEDS WITH SPECIALTY

Neil Simon describes his play "The Good Doctor" — a dramatization of some of Anton Chekhov's early short stories — as "not a play at all," but a pastiche of sketches and "an enjoyable interlude before getting on to bigger things." Translation?

Don't expect "The Cherry Orchard" or even "The Odd Couple."

Instead, in the new production at the Georgetown Palace Theatre under the direction of Ron Watson, the scenes are painted broadly enough to hide any subtlety. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

In a small ensemble cast, Eric Davis is lovably antic and credulous as a low-level civil servant who sneezes on his boss' head, as a half-cocked apprentice dentist, and as a busker charging audiences three rubles to watch him drown. These roles ask for nothing more than earnestly following along with Chekhov and Simon's oblivious comedy, and Davis does so admirably.

But when the play wanders toward either author's more ruminative themes, the production strays. As the Writer, a Chekhovian master of ceremonies for the evening, Dana Barnes muses about the nature of art, comedy and sex. But what should feel like a natural wandering among the themes feels instead like a halting lecture sprinkled with preplanned jokes and visual examples. Likewise, Walter Womack and Nikki Bora are excellent in the comic roles of Davis' dental patient and a harpy of a housewife, but sound unnatural, not lyrical, when forced to rhyme their way through the one completely serious piece of the evening set to sappy, canned music.

For what it mostly is — simple, vaudevillian comedy with a twist — "The Good Doctor" is entertaining. For what it occasionally tries to be? Not so much.

("The Good Doctor" continues at 7:30 p.m. today through Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday. The Georgetown Palace Theatre, 810 S. Austin Avenue, Georgetown, TX. $7-$18. 512-869-7469, www.thegeorgetownpalace.org.)

— Joey Seiler